Street Legal Racing Redline, but good.

You get to actually modify cars "by hand" swapping out or repairing individual components and the chassis can get bent up by big wrecks, you can buy new or used cars and tear them down and build them up and just cruise the world do street or track racing, demo derby etc. It's all extremely rough but conceptually it's the best thing ever, you really get to "own" a car and experience the highs and lows associated with that.

The closest game with any amount of polish I've played is Test Drive: Eve of Destruction you buy cars at the junkyard and take them to demo derbies, they need to be repaired upgraded etc and they have permanent damage from big hits.

Obviously there is My Summer Car and Mon Bazou both great games but they lack a racing centric gameplay loop and MSC in particular is too hardcore to be a mainstream game.